Parallel Mind, The Art of Creativity: The missing manual for your right brain

by Aliyah Marr

This book is about how to live a creative life; not how to paint or draw, but how to think like an artist, and how to find a joyous, complete life as a result. Author and artist Aliyah Marr uses practical examples and guides us through conceptual, transpersonal art experiments to demonstrate how we can use the power of art to access our inner child, express our buried emotions, and use any form of art as a catalyst to transform our lives. Artists have known this that the application of principle and skills learned in any art can be the springboard to creativity in any field, but when we finally release our inner creative genius we become empowered in every part of our lives. Aliyah Marr draws from her experience as a teacher, visual artist, poet, graphic designer, and author to demonstrate how you can change your body, your profession, your relationship, and your life just by changing your thoughts. Packed with practical examples and exercises from every visual art, theater, music, video, poetry, scriptwriting and dance, this book shows you how to use art to first express, and then clarify thoughts and emotions to create whatever you want. A powerful reference guide for artists, educators, psychologists, entrepreneurs, scientists, and for those who have an interest in a practical form of self-development. Jungian, Gestalt, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming all address the same subconscious that is ruling our lives, for good or bad. A powerful alliance with the personal subconscious gives us access to the most powerful creative force of all, the same power that fuels the stars and guides our lives. Artist Aliyah Marr shows us how we can use art to bring our subconscious to the surface, how to make a friend of this powerful force, and then how to use it to create the life of our dreams. A powerful alliance with the personal subconscious gives us access to the most powerful creative force of all, the same power that fuels the stars and guides our lives. Aliyah shows us how we can use art to bring our subconscious to the surface, how to make a friend of this powerful force, and then how to use it to create the life of our dreams. This book answers some essential questions, the most important what is creativity, and how can it bring me freedom and happiness? Pure creativity includes (but not limited to): a painter who paints from his heart, a musician who creates a symphony while toying at the piano, a writer who bases a screenplay on the people she knows at work, a scientist who discovers a new law of the universe by playing with raw materials and outlandish ideas. Applied creativity includes design, architecture, scientific inquiry, technological innovations, copywriting, and business development. Parallel Mind, The Art of Creativity shows you...

258 pages, Paperback

First published November 21, 2008

About the author

"There is a treasure map inside you, a map to your deepest dreams, to a power that you have had since birth, a guide to a world of unimaginable riches."

Aliyah Marr is the author of the Parallel Mind series of books and games on creative development.

Free newsletter: http://parallelmind.wordpress.com

Aliyah Marr is a multimedia artist, interactive designer, published author, teacher, life coach, personal trainer, and motivational speaker. She is the author of the book "Parallel Mind, The Art of Creativity" and chief engineer of The Thetawave Project, a collaborative space for creative personal and social evolution.

Aliyah Marr has worked as a gymnastics coach, personal trainer, illustrator, graphic designer, art director, corporate trainer, adjunct professor, and arts reporter in Paris. She has given seminars, produced tutorials and has taught graphic design, drawing, programming, web design and motion graphics at three of the top design schools in the country.

She is a creative director with a stellar list of Fortune 100 clients: companies such as IBM, American Express, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and Chivas.

Aliyah is a published author with articles in major magazines, such as Create Magazine and Business Week.

She was originally trained as a fine artist at the famous L'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris France and has exhibited her artwork internationally: her work has been featured in the Siggraph show in Los Angeles California.

Currently, she is giving workshops and seminars on her book, "Parallel Mind, The Art of Creativity," and is writing her next book on practical applications of creative development. She believes in the transfomative power of creative thinking and brings all her years of teaching and design experience to the table in helping others become the creative architects of their own lives.

Reviews

[Shirley Kingery · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a motivational, self-help book whose object is to convince you that you can control your destiny and free your creative impulses. By allowing your creative side to come out and break free of the rigid strictures we place on our daily lives, you will be able to reach new heights and strive for new, more true-to-yourself goals. Parallel Mind is full of positivity and suggestions and practices for incorporating artistic, creative, play-type activities into your routine.

The writing is clear and easy to understand, much like an informal conversation. In fact, it read alot like a blog article, or series of articles might so it wasn't surprising to discover in the information given about the book that it first appeared in a series of blog articles in the author's blog.

Some of the author's beliefs and suggestions struck home with me; while others did not. Some of her ideas and beliefs I disagreed with entirely. But all in all, I enjoyed this quick read and appreciated its positivity in general as well as its cheerleading for creativism.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is all about developing your creative potential. It is not a manual on how to paint or write or make music, but rather on how to think creatively. The text is full of small exercises and tips that can be used to stimulate creativity and for self improvement, and all of these are handily brought together at the end of the book also in an appendix.

The writing style of the book is fluid and easy going. The author clearly can write well. It would make a very helpful self help guide for stimulating creativity.

However I did not like everything about this book, and my objections will centre around what the book would consider my "left brain" thinking. That term is at the heart of my problem with the book though. The title is expounded within. "Parallel mind" is all about our right brain (creative) and left brain (rational) tension. The writer quotes Richard Bergland's 1985 writing "Modern brain scientists now know that
your left-brain is your verbal and rational brain; [...] Your right brain is your nonverbal and intuitive
brain". However, brain scientists who are a bit more modern again now understand that the brain hemispheres are much more co-dependent than this. the author recognises new scholarship when she writes:

"Although there is new scientific evidence that functions such as language are not the sole province of just one hemisphere, for the purposes of this book I will stick with the broader classifications of brain functions: the left as the logical and linear brain, and the right as the creative, intuitive brain. "

But this made me wonder what the point of the terms really are? If, as we now know, rational thought uses right and left brain co-dependently, as does creative thought, then "right brain" is divorced from any meaning in science and becomes just a synonym of "creative" and "left brain" is a synonym of "rational". And in fact the point is well made in the book that creative people use all their brain. They are rational AND creative.

So when the book develops this analogy of parallel minds with: ""No matter what you think may be happening, you are always thinking with both brains. In computer lingo, this is called "parallel processing""

I have to disagree. The two brain hemispheres are not two distinct cores in a multiprocessor system - instead the brain is a marvelous and intricately interconnected system where different brain areas have different functions but they all work together to make something coherent. The attempt to break the mind into just two parallel parts - rational and intuitive/creative is, in my opinion illegitimate (but as a "left brainer" I would say that !)

There is a lot of appeal to science in this book. Only a little of it is footnoted. Statements like "It is theorized in the scientific community that the normal life span of humans should be at least 120 years." or "Science has discovered that the brain cannot tell a fantasy from a sensory perception. This is because everything in the brain is merely a thought. " may well be important and true observations, but they are asserted without footnotes so it is hard to check their veracity.

This would be less of a problem if there were not some glaring errors in fact in a few places (less important places, but the problem is that if I know the author has been in error on X that I know about than how can I trust she is correct on Y that I do not know about?)

One of these gaffes was the assertion that Columbus showed his creative genius by proving the world was round despite everyone else who said it was flat. In fact the dispute was not at all about the shape of the earth - that had been settled about 1800 years earlier by Eratosthenes, but the issue was about the circumference of the earth, that Eratosthenes had measured. Columbus believed Ptolemy's estimate of circumference that was much less accurate than Eratosthenes, and thought it would be quicker to sail west to India. Had he not bumped into America on the way he would have died on the very considerably longer westward passage. But Columbus was more lucky than right. (The myth that Columbus proved the earth was round was invented by a French atheist - Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787-1848), who seems to have wanted to discredit the church).

A second gaffe was:

"when the hard drives of two (or more) computers work in tandem to execute a task at double speed."

No, parallel processing is where 2 or more processors or cores are acting upon instructions of 2 or more processes or computational threads at the same time. Hard drives are a type of storage - they do not "process" anything.

But neither of these gaffes is major. They did not ruin the book. For me they instead ensured my critical thinking skills were engaged - asking, whenever facts were presented, "is this actually right"?

Ultimately it does not matter if not all the information is right because the book still contains some very interesting exercises to try. The book is about creativity and not knowledge, and for anyone wanting ideas to stimulate their creativity, there are plenty in this work.

So ultimately, a very good book for aspiring "right brainers", but unrepentant "left brainers" may have a few problems with it!

[Julie Gengo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every individual needs a dose of this book. Creativity is the heart and soul of existence and Aliyah expertly explains this concept so that you fully understand and can absorb the message. Creativity is for everyone no matter what you do, who you are or where you dare to tread.

[Aliyah Marr]

This is my book, to see reviews go to Amazon. ISBN: 9780982105917

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is fun and also highly useful. If you ever thought that unlocking your creativity would change your life for the better, this is the book you have to read.